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Originally Posted by chiefsmurph
5. Out of curiosity, what does "Fully Meshed BGP Network with diversified carriers" mean?
6. Another curiosity question: What do these all mean:
Network Options
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$100 Cross Connects
$50 Access filter list
$50 BGP Accounement
$5 Telco line charge
( Telco charge not included )
Should I be interested in any of these?
Thanks
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Just thought I'd add a few bits. Most of the above, you won't need to worry about.
5) A fully meshed network is one where every individual router has a direct connection to every other router in the data center. In general, this is expensive, but provides a lot of redundancy and quick connections between any 2 points in the data center.
BGP stands for Borer Gateway Protocol, and it is a protocol where each router announces the networks that it can route to, along with a cost (ie. the number of hops) associated with that route.
Together, it means that if one route goes down, it will no longer be announced via BGP, and the routers will automatically re-route traffic by the next lowest cost route in accordance with the various announcements made onto the network.
BGP announcements are how the internet holds together on an IP level. Needless to say, the above description is way over simplified.
6) I'll cover these one by one. Note that some of these may have data center specific meanings, so could be slightly wrong.
$100 Cross Connects
This seems expensive, it usually refers to the cost of conneccting together equipment in differant parts of the data center. Was this a one off cost ? I would expect it to be the cost of actually running cables between racks or servers, to make up a private network.
$50 Access filter list
This usually just means you can have custom rules added to the data center firewall to limit which networks can access your server.
$50 BGP Accounement
You won't need this unless you are planning on having a large IP address space. When you manage your own IP address space, you need to have BGP announcements onto the internet carriers in order for your network to be found. Thats what BGP announcements do.
$5 Telco line charge
I think here they are refering to the cost of allowing you to get a telco to run a line directly to your server or rack.
Most of the above will be of little interest unless you are dealing with quarter racks or bigger. If you just loooking for colocating a 1u or 2u server, then you will normally get a cable run to the server in with the cost, and a monthly bandwidth allocation.
You may also want to know if they offer an RRP (Remote Reboot Port) which is very useful when your server crashes during bootup. Also, ask for clarification on the bandwidth, as all sorts of tricks are used when describing what you get. For example, rackspace offer unlkimited bandwidth, but throttle the server to 2 Mb/s in each direction, therefore limiting the bandwidth indirectly.
